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HOME TOPICS ABOUT ME Oh, what a wicked world of words! Your 56k modem doesn't push those bits out and pull them in at 56k. It does it much faster. And much slower. |
technofile Al Fasoldt's reviews and commentaries, continuously available online since 1983 The wacky world of figuring Internet connection speedsJuly 5, 2000 By Al Fasoldt Copyright ©2000, Al Fasoldt Copyright ©2000, The Syracuse Newspapers How fast does your computer go when you're on the Internet? If you answer "200 megahertz" you get disqualified. Your Internet connection speed is measured not in megahertz ("MHz") but in kilobits or megabits per second, based on how fast your modem is or how fast your so-called "broadband" connection is. Any speed measured in megahertz is how fast your computer's internal processor runs. It varies in modern computers from less than 100 MHz to more than 900 Mhz. The processor speed in millions of operations per second isn't related to the bits per second speed of Internet connections. So the first disappointing thing you learn when you are trying to get a boost in your Internet connection speed is that a faster computer doesn't help. (In other words, getting a faster computer won't make your Internet connection any speedier.) "Bits" are the smallest whole units that can be sent back and forth on a network or stored on a computer. Think of bits as being one piece of information and you'll get the idea. (Is grandma coming for dinner? The answer "yes" can be expressed as one bit. It's an "either-or" kind of thing.) Computers store a lot of bits and send a lot of them back and forth, so to keep from being swamped by the very hugeness of the numbers, we usually talk of kilobits (thousands of bits) and megabits (millions of them). These days we even have gigabits (billions of the little things). But when we're connected to the Internet, these bits don't loiter long enough to leave much of an impression. Speed is what matters. The time it takes for a bit to go from your place to my place -- from your computer to mine, in other words -- is your computer's "throughput." And how fast can that throughput be? If your computer gets its kicks through a modem connection, you'd think your throughput would be the speed of the modem. What makes more sense than that? If you have the fastest kind of normal modem -- a 56k modem, able to send and receive 56 kilobits per second -- you'd naturally think your maximum speed, or throughput, would be 56 kilobits per second. (I'll just call that "k" from now on, like everybody else does.) So a 56k modem should zip along at 56k, right? Oh, what a wicked world of words! Your 56k modem doesn't push those bits out and pull them in at 56k. It does it much faster. And much slower. Either-or. And you don't get a choice in the matter. And the same goes for the other modem speeds, too. If you have a 33.6k modem, it's wheezing and puffing at different speeds than you might think. How could this happen? Is it a conspiracy? Hardly. Unless the laws of physics could be considered conspiracy theorists. Here's what really happens. The first thing that affects the speed is your phone line. Bad line, bad speed. Good line, good speed. It's that simple. If you have a 33.6k modem and never get more than, say, 21.6k out of it, you can bet your phone line is bad. The second thing? Give this idea a brain squeeze: Your modem compresses the daylights out of data. It turns long documents into short ones, big files into small ones. Stuff that can't be squeezed down -- something that's already compressed, maybe, like a ZIP file -- won't be touched. But anything with a lot of empty space in it -- no, I don't mean your brother-in-law's noggin -- will be smooshed into a fraction of the space it used to take up. A file that was 100 kilobytes might be squeezed down to 25 kilobytes. Here's where Einstein comes in. Time and space are related. Albert told us all about it in his Theory of Relativity. Suppose you have a train that's a mile long. It takes 50 seconds to go through a tunnel. Suppose you take off half the cars so the train is now only a half mile long. It will take only 25 seconds to go through that tunnel. This is the Einstein part: The train didn't go any faster, even though it went through the tunnel in less time. Now consider that 100-kilobyte file. Squeeze it to 25 kilobytes and send it at the SAME speed as before and it gets there in one-fourth the time. It gets there four times as fast. So that 56k modem might be considered a 224k modem if it's compressing everything the best that it can. And that 33.6k modem might be considered a 134.4k modem. You get the idea. Finally, to see how fast your Internet throughput actually is, test it at a Web site that will measure how long it takes for data to arrive. One of the best for testing is http://206.170.44.66/NetTest.html. Give it a try. |